Ant-Man’s Peyton Reed Says Female Superheroes are a “No-Brainer,” Wants Fair Play For the Wasp

Jill Pantozzi | November 11th, 2015

All things being equal, Evangeline Lilly should have been the star of Ant-Man. Thankfully Peyton Reed is up for the challenge of making female superheroes a priority in the Marvel movie universe both on screen and off.

Marvel hasn’t officially nailed down Reed or writer Adam McKay for the Ant-Man sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp, yet but both seem keen to continue their work. McKay told The Hollywood Reporter recently, “I was talking to [Paul] Rudd about it the other day. We’ll see what happens, but that would certainly be fun. I loved working with Marvel.”

‘That was one of the things that was important to me in the first movie when I came on was emphasizing the Wasp more, both Hope Van Dyne and Janet Van Dyne,’ he said. ‘It’s a crucial part. It’s a crucial part because in the comic books, with the exception of the first handful of Ant-Man stories, Wasp came on pretty early on in the comics in the ’60s and you really thought of them as a partnership, a romantic partnership as well as a hero team. It’s going to be fun to play around with all the aspects of that in this movie.’

Considering Marvel Entertainment’s shaky history with their female characters (getting left off team merchandise, getting their films pushed back for Spider-Man, etc.), it’s nice to hear Reed knows the importance of highlighting Wasp.

He told MTV he plans to “be loud” in regards to the character’s merchandise for the film and that empowered female characters have always been important to him. “So to me it’s something that I’m just psyched to be able to explore in this movie,” he said.

‘It’s such a no-brainer that there needs to be female heroes,’ Reed said. ‘It’s about keeping the stories interesting and having fresh stories to tell. I always like that about Ant-Man and Wasp because it dealt with gender politics as well as superhero stuff. In the comics, particularly in the ’60s comics, the Janet Van Dyne Wasp was clearly written by all men and was pretty one-dimensional. She’s gotten much more dimensionalized since then. That’s one of those things that I think is going to be really exciting and fresh about this movie. You do feel a certain amount of responsibility.’

‘It just happened to be organic for the characters of Ant-Man and Wasp, [so] it worked,’ he said. ‘Her last line in the movie — “It’s about damn time” — [is] very much about her specific character and arc in that movie, but it is absolutely about a larger thing. It’s about damn time: We’re going to have a fully realized, very very complicated hero in the next movie who happens to be a woman.’